An Earnest Response to a Classic Comedy

When Oscar Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest
back in 1895, he subtitled it “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.”
That’s an apt description for a show still produced with frequency 117
years later — and as funny as ever. It’s about two guys who create
imaginary friends (one named Ernest, the other named Bunbury) who
provide excuses to escape from social obligations. Of course, their
cleverness eventually goes off the tracks in the pursuit of love
(including a young woman enamored of the name “Ernest”) and they’re
caught. The play on words between the name “Ernest” and “earnest,” the
quality of being honest and upright, is exemplary of Wilde’s witty
writing. The show has become a classic, making it a perfect choice for
Cincinnati Shakespeare Company to offer to audiences during the holiday
season at its downtown Race Street theater.

According to Artistic Director Brian Phillips, it’s not the first time CSC has staged Earnest.
There was a co-production with Children’s Theatre of Cincinnati at the
Taft Theatre back in 2001, and CSC’s own staging in 2005. The current
production opens Friday, directed by Phillips for the first time. Actor
Jeremy Dubin has played both of the young dissemblers, John Worthing in
2001 and Algernon Moncrief in 2005; he’s returning to the role of
Worthing this time.

A recent amusing concept for the show has
been to have an actor in drag play the deliciously domineering role of
Lady Bracknell, the overbearing aunt of Gwendolyn Fairfax, Algernon’s
cousin who is pursued by the enamored John. Bracknell is the stern
epitome of Victorian morals and judgmental behavior, topics Wilde loved
to satirize.

I asked Phillips the inspiration for this
visual joke, and he wasn’t certain of its origin.

A bit of online
research indicates that it was first done in the mid-1970s at Canada’s
Stratford Shakespeare Festival with William Hutt playing the old
battle-axe. More recently, for the same esteemed company, the wonderful
actor Brian Bedford did the same, a production that transferred to New
York City for a run on Broadway that landed Bedford a Tony Award
nomination. (The role’s most memorable female interpreter was the
British actress Dame Edith Evans, who played Lady Bracknell onstage in
the late 1930s and in a wonderful cinematic version in 1952. The disdain
she slathered on the role has influenced actors ever since.)

CSC continues the Lady Bracknell
cross-dressing tradition with six-year company member Jim Hopkins taking
on the role. Phillips says he and Hopkins have worked hard to keep the
character from simply being a collection of quirky observations and
funny quips, “things you’d see on a T-shirt,” as Phillips characterizes
them. (“To lose one parent,” she opines to Jack, who has mentioned being
an orphan, “may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like
carelessness.”)

Phillips, a veteran classical actor who
interned at Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati and then spent four years as an
actor in Cincinnati Shakespeare’s company, has been the theater’s
artistic director for a decade. He directs actors to hew close to the
text of any show he stages. “I tell them to follow the punctuation, to
pause at every comma and do a full stop when it’s called for. That’s the
way to find the humor in a show like Earnest. It’s not just the situations that are funny — it’s the language that Wilde uses to set them up.”

Phillips played a drag role in the 2001 production of Earnest.
As a member of CSC’s acting company, he portrayed Miss Prism, a
befuddled nursemaid in Lady Bracknell’s employ. He confesses that he
didn’t really know what he was doing in that role (cross-dressing is not
a tradition with Miss Prism), but he had fun with it. Now that he’s a
director, he has his own clear ideas of how Wilde’s comedy works best.

“I’ve asked Jim to play Lady Bracknell
straight,” Phillips says. “The humor is there in what Wilde wrote.
There’s no need to ham it up. In fact, it’s funniest when the actor
maintains a kind of stillness and lets the words and situations create
the humor.” Phillips appreciates working with Hopkins. “He’s masterful
at creating a role and then holding true to it throughout the run of the
show.”

The Importance of Being Earnest is
a fine example of how classic plays never lose their sheen. Phillips
tells me that CSC’s production is selling like teacakes and cucumber
sandwiches. Better get yours now; the production runs through Dec. 16.